It’s just possible that Kenny Finkle’s exit from Ford’s Theatre was the hastiest since John Wilkes Booth stage-dove from the place’s balcony in 1865.

As it happens, the two retreats — by the playwright and the presidential assassin — are weirdly related. They’re also linked to the Old Globe Theatre’s “Alive and Well,” which opens this week (and is, of all things, a romantic comedy, but stay with us).

As the playwright tells it, he was commissioned about five years ago by Ford’s – the Washington, D.C., location of Abraham Lincoln’s fatal 1865 shooting, and now home to regular stage productions — to write a play about the night of the assassination.

But as Finkle tried to craft a story, he sensed that the doomed president “didn’t have that much drama that night. He went to see a comedy, he sat down, he watched a couple of acts, he laughed a lot, he got shot in the head. I said, ‘I don’t really know how to make a play out of that.’ ”

So instead, Finkle focused the piece on Booth — which apparently was not what the theater had in mind. The play got as far as a single reading; its first scene had Booth jumping from the balcony, yelling, ‘Sic semper tyrannis!’ (the assassin’s famous Latin proclamation against tyrants).

“Really, I think if they could have fired me right at that moment, they would have,” Finkle says. “But they had to wait the 45 minutes until the play was finished.”

Finkle didn’t actually flee, and he admits with a laugh that he wasn’t technically fired, either. Instead, he walked away after declining a chance to rewrite. Yet the short-lived commission proved “extraordinarily fruitful,” because the research behind it paved the way for “Alive and Well,” a play set in modern times but steeped in dramas and traumas that stretch back to the Confederacy.

The two-character work, directed by Jeremy Dobrish, is a co-world premiere with Virginia Stage Co., where it had a run last fall. Its story involves a magazine reporter named Carla (Kelly McAndrew) and a Civil War re-enactor named Zachariah (James Knight), who’ve been reluctantly paired to search the South for a mysterious figure known as the Lonesome Soldier.

“People claim he’s a bona fide veteran of the Civil War,” Finkle says. “He may be a ghost, he may be a living person, they don’t know. So, she’s been hired to try and find this guy, and Zach has been hired to be her guide, because he knows the land really well.”

Along the way, the cynical Northerner and the devoted son of the South work up their own little civil war. Finkle describes the play as a throwback to old-style romcoms, and the setup does seem reminiscent of Hollywood classics such as “It Happened One Night” and “The Philadelphia Story.”

Finkle found prime inspiration, though, in modern accounts of the Civil War’s legacy in the South. Especially pivotal was “Confederates in the Attic,” Tony Horwitz’s 1998 book whose topics rove from war re-enactors to “Gone With the Wind” to continuing racial frictions.

“What (Horwitz) sort of found, and where the name comes from, is that the Civil War is alive and well in America,” Finkle says. “We’re still living it.”

Though Finkle is hesitant to generalize, he perceives “a lot of sentiment (among Southerners) that we’re just taking a break from the war. Some people say they would never go to the Appomattox Court House (site of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s capitulation), because as long as they don’t go there, they don’t have to believe the South surrendered. Things like that.”

For Southerners and Northerners alike, there’s also the reality that “unlike any other war, the Civil War happened on our soil. So that history is such a direct line to who we are, where we came from. All the issues that were part of the Civil War are still things we’re coming to terms with.

“People can say: ‘My great-great-grandaddy fought right here. And we have the flag he carried into battle hanging in our living room.’ Those things aren’t abstract.”

There’s absolutely nothing abstract about re-enactors, those serious souls who meticulously mimic the war experience, right down to the dying.

“Zachariah tells us he’s famous because he can do ‘the bloat,’ which is what happens to soldiers when they die and have been left for a couple of days,” says Finkle. “(The armies) didn’t know so many people were going to die, so they didn’t have a way of disposing of bodies.

“He says he ‘gives good bloat.’ He’s hard-core.”

In the world of re-enactment, the cardinal sin is “farb,” which Finkle describes as “a mix of two words, ‘fake’ and ‘garb,’ ” although there are differing accounts of its derivation.

“Re-enactors say to each other, ‘Look at that guy; he looks farby.’ He doesn’t look authentic. It’s a super-important thing. Like, the skinnier you are, (the better), so you look as though you haven’t eaten.”

This all can sound a little goofy to outsiders. As Finkle puts it: “We think these people are kind of funny, like (characters from) a Renaissance fair.

“But it’s really coming from a totally different place than that. It’s coming from a real need to preserve and remember what happened in our country. And specifically in the South, where the history is so alive. They really feel they’re the keepers of the story.”

And a play seems as good an excuse as any to poke around in that particular attic. It’s worth remembering that Booth himself was a stage performer who actually had appeared at Ford’s Theatre.

His last act there failed to leave ’em laughing. “Alive and Well” at least has a better shot at that.